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Renewable Energy for the Data Center?
rohar asks: "The ISP/Carrier/Colo company I work for has just announced a new 'green' program. Although this is a step forward, they don't have a comprehensive environmental sustainability plan. I have been leading an open renewable energy project and I think we have 2 novel ideas for scalable and reliable renewable electrical power, the Solar Ammonia Absorption Convection Tower and the Compressed Air Wind Electrical Generation System. Do you have new ideas (Solar PV has been done, for example) for renewable power generation and conservation for the data center and other areas of industry?"
How much energy is lost by having AC-DC converters for battery backup only to convert it back to AC then back to DC in the server?
Put a single pair of load-sensitive, redundant power supplies on each rack and run DC to every device. One of these should have battery backup.
Yes, there will be a lot more wires but it will be a lot more efficient and have lower air-conditioning costs.
Speaking of air conditioning, if you can channel the heat to something useful, that's a plus.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How about:
- Grow plants (or algae) that have a high energy content and do not need good land. E.g. algae can be grown in salt water, switchgrass grows well in a variety of circumstances that other crops don't like, and kudzu grows whether you want it or not.
- Use the energy captured in these plants to generate electricity. There are various options here, too: extract oil from algae and combust that, convert the sugars in the plant matter to ethanol and burn that, or perhaps burn the plants whole.
I don't know which combinations of growing, harvesting, extraction, conversion, and combustion are most efficient. However, there is definitely a lot of variation here. Studies that have been done that prove some combinations aren't worth it (you have to put in more energy than you get out), and others are (you can actually supply the US with enough energy, without running out of space to grow crops for food).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This is nothing more than a slashvertisement for Rohar's crackpot 'green' energy schemes. (One of which was recently debunked on Slashdot.)
Conservation Ideas
- D.C. rather than A.C. power mains
- Waste heat recovery for structures or cottage industries
- Power saving features in server hardware
- Server Virtualization
- Better High Availability/Redundancy resource management
Generation IdeasI suggest keeping a "green" server farm simple by outsourcing your "green".
Where I live, (Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley,) I buy solar and wind power directly from the grid. It's not the cheapest electricity, but it is affordable. PG&E, a major electric company in CA, has very low carbon output per kilowatt hour. They also allow you to sponsor reforestation, thus allowing you to recapture the carbon generated from running your servers.
It is also possible to buy carbon credits. This is where you essentially pay someone to remove carbon from the air. At the consumer level, Terrapass allows consumers to purchase carbon credits.
No, I will not work for your startup
Alternatively, if you are near a major body of water you can use it for cooling
Good luck getting your local building department to agree with you on that one. Typically using 'public' bodies of water for anything practical like this will get you run out of town. In New England, we would love to start using Geothermal systems on our houses with an ocean source or water well as the heat sink, but some towns prohibit wells of any kind, and the DEC's conservation commission has took us to task on laying pipe under the beach to deeper water on two seperate occasions.
Any use of resources like water can get political fast, a recent example is opposition to this project in upstate new york.
People don't seem to get that 'green' building & living isn't a technological issue, it is much more about politics and marketing. There is enough momentum against it that anyone who does something the least bit different is labeled eccentric. In my experience, also, town officials around here are good ol boy Neanderthals when it comes to alternative energy and our impending crisis. Better to waste all that heat, I guess.
Dammit Otto, you have lupus.